Ten Movies We Can’t Wait to See at the Toronto Film Festival

A documentary about the financial crisis, a Philip Roth adaptation, and a Jackie Kennedy biopic round out our most anticipated films.

August 29, 2016

Summer movie season is over, thank
goodness, and now it’s time to bring on the awards contenders. There are
three major festivals over the next several weeks, all of them unrolling plenty
of promising new films. The Toronto Film Festival remains the best for one-stop
shopping, combining the highlights of earlier festivals (Cannes and Berlin) with
a large percentage of Venice and Telluride’s offerings. All told, this year’s
edition is showing 296 features, including 228 that are making either their
North American or world premiere.

So, how to choose? It’s not easy, but below are the ten films I’m most excited to check out. Fingers crossed we’ve got some gems in store for us.

Abacus: Small Enough to Jail

In the wake of the 2008 financial
collapse, many Americans were rightly furious that none of the architects of
the Wall Street disaster were indicted. Documentary filmmaker Steve James reminds
us that one bank did get busted: Abacus
chronicles the plight of New York City’s Abacus Federal Savings, a tiny,
family-run institution that catered mostly to Chinese immigrants in the
community. The director of Hoop Dreams
and Life Itself has described the
film as a David-and-Goliath battle between a vindictive Manhattan district
attorney’s office and the Sung family, who were accused of mortgage fraud—even though
they had played by the rules while many larger financial institutions got away
scot-free.

American Pastoral

This adaptation of Philip Roth’s
1997 novel looks both very enticing and incredibly worrisome. On the plus side,
the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, about American exceptionalism and one family’s
fall from grace, is superb—and the film features a talented ensemble that
includes Jennifer Connelly, Dakota Fanning, Uzo Aduba and David Strathairn. But
the concern is that this is also the directorial debut of Ewan McGregor, who
stars as Seymour “Swede” Levov, a man living a seemingly enviable life until
tragedy strikes at the height of the Vietnam War. McGregor is a splendid actor,
but translating Roth to the big screen is a tricky proposition for even veteran
filmmakers. (This summer’s Indignation
was one of the rare successes.) Nonetheless, anticipation is high for a film
that could either be a major Oscar contender or a huge disappointment.

Arrival

No one can doubt director Denis
Villeneuve’s talent: Sicario, Prisoners and Incendies are filled with arresting scenes and emotional
performances. My problem with his films is that they tend toward preachy
self-seriousness—he’s the sort of guy who puts Radiohead songs on his
soundtracks to pump up the gravitas. (This is why my favorite of his is 2013’s
midnight-movie-ish Enemy, the creepy,
darkly funny Jake Gyllenhaal psychological thriller about two strangers who
look alike but behave very differently.) On its face, Arrival seems to be another helping of Big Themes, as Amy Adams,
Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker make first contact with an alien spaceship. Villeneuve’s
film promises to be a realistic, grown-up version of the dopey Independence Day-style invasion movies
we normally get. It looks pretty great—let’s just hope Villeneuve eases up on
the sermonizing.

The Bad Batch

With 2014’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour
introduced herself to the world, crafting a moody, romantic vampire-Western
that was partly scored by gloomy goth-rock. She follows up that striking debut
with this stylized horror film. The Bad
Batch is set in a future America that’s been overrun by cannibals. “Road
Warrior meets Pretty in Pink with
a dope soundtrack,” is how Amirpour has
described her film, which stars Suki Waterhouse, Jason Momoa, Keanu Reeves
and Jim Carrey. Who’s ready for a potentially super-cool post-apocalyptic love
story?

Jackie

The assassination of President John
F. Kennedy has been dramatized in films such as JFK and Parkland. But Chilean
director Pablo Larraín (best known for his 2012 Oscar-nominated political satire
No) examines the tragedy from the
perspective of his widow. Jackie
stars Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy, and the film tells her story in
pieces, chronicling key moments before and after his killing. Larraín has been
on a roll of late—his biographical drama Neruda
was a critical hit at Cannes—and Jackie serves
as his English-language debut, which costars Peter Sarsgaard, Greta Gerwig,
Billy Crudup and John Hurt.

La La Land

Writer-director Damien Chazelle’s
first two films were music-themed dramas: 2009’s Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench and his Oscar-winning 2014
breakthrough Whiplash. His latest
continues the tradition and pushes it even further. La La Land is a widescreen musical set in Los Angeles that follows
the love story between a jazz pianist (Ryan Gosling) and an actress (Emma
Stone). With a gasp-inducing trailer that evokes everything from New York, New York to Moulin Rouge to Punch-Drunk Love, La La Land looks
to be the quintessential, old-Hollywood “they don’t make ‘em like this anymore”
movie.

My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea

Toronto’s press guide describes
the feature debut of graphic novelist Dash Shaw like this: “My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea
is like John Hughes fused with The
Poseidon Adventure.” This surreal animated film revolves around teenaged
best friends (voiced by Reggie Watts and Jason Schwartzman) who have to stay
alive after a massive earthquake hits, sending their school into the Pacific
Ocean. Sporting hand-drawn animation and a voice cast that includes Lena Dunham,
Maya Rudolph and Susan Sarandon, My
Entire High School has all the makings of a groovy cult movie.

Nocturnal Animals

This fall could be a big one for
Amy Adams. Not only is she the lead in Arrival,
but she also stars in Nocturnal Animals,
the first movie from fashion designer and filmmaker Tom Ford since his touching
2009 debut A Single Man. Nocturnal Animals concerns the owner of
an art gallery (Adams) who rarely sees her traveling husband (Armie Hammer) and
is surprised one day to receive a manuscript written by her estranged first
husband (Jake Gyllenhaal). This thriller follows Adams as she reads the novel,
her real life starting to intertwine with the manuscript’s tale of a family
going away for a deadly vacation. Is the book some sort of threat? And what
happens when she reaches the end? Based on Austin Wright’s 1993 novel Tony and Susan, Nocturnal Animals boasts a starry supporting cast of Michael
Shannon, Isla Fisher, Laura Linney and Michael Sheen.

Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey

Terrence Malick’s recent
films haven’t lived up to the transcendence of The Tree of Life, but fans have been patiently waiting for one
particular long-in-the-works project: a documentary that chronicles the birth
of the universe. That’s an ambitious undertaking, and at long last Voyage of Time is ready to be seen.
Narrated by Cate Blanchett, who appeared in this year’s Knight of Cups, the documentary combines CGI and live-action
footage to trace humanity’s origins. In other words, if your favorite segment of The Tree of Life was Malick’s majestic, 2001-like depiction of Earth’s earliest days, this may gave you a feature-length head-trip.

Yourself and Yours

South Korean writer-director Hong
Sang-soo is one of our most dependable filmmakers: Not only does he tend to
make a movie a year, but it usually ends up being really good. His eighteenth
feature, following hot on the heels of this summer’s terrific Right Now, Wrong Then, sounds like
another of his indelible comedy-dramas about lovably flawed people negotiating
complicated romantic relationships while drinking too much. Yourself and Yours stars Kim Joo-hyuck
as a beleaguered painter who learns that his girlfriend (Lee You-young) wants a
break—but once they separate, he starts seeing versions of her all over town.
Hong often fiddles with time and reality, creating parallel worlds that underline
his concerns about the power that fate and luck have over our lives. His movies
may be modest, but they’re rich with resonance, making each new offering its
own event.

Tim Grierson is the senior U.S. critic for Screen International, chief film critic for Paste and a contributing editor at Backstage and MEL.